Night Shift

by Stephen King

In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.”

Art is a localized illness, usually benign—creative

We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.

Fear has always been big. Death has always been big. They are two of the human constants. But only the writer of horror and the supernatural gives the reader such an opportunity for total identification and catharsis.

horror fiction is like a central subway station in the human psyche between the blue line of what we can safely internalize and the red line of what we need to get rid of in some way or another.

From inside it was a movie. Out here it was real, you could get killed.

smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wiping away the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year's grass bare and uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother.

love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.

She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit.

It is the walk of people who are going nowhere slowly, the walk of college students in caps and gowns filing into a convocation hall.